I am bad with titles. I can write whole poems and stories and articles but I always get stumped with the title. Even my blog post titles cause me a bit of a pain.

Then I had to name my paintings. I can't shirk it and get away with "Untitled". That's just not me. But I also don't want to spend an inordinate amount of energy thinking up names.

I am not a fan of the descriptive titles either, such as "Girl With Cat", or "Apples in Bowl". I also don't want to lead the viewer so much with titles that hint at what I'm trying to show in the artwork. I also don't want to be pretentiously obscure.

At the same time I want the names to also somehow reflect something about me as a person and as an artist.

So I pondered on it. And then came up with a solution.

Since the core of my artwork is flowers, I started with that. Flowers, no matter how you twist and turn it, are closely associated with the feminine. I see nothing wrong or offensive with that. So I decided my pieces will have feminine or female names.

But not just any name. They have to feel right to me, to resonate with me, or evoke certain types of associations. I started a list.

Any name that did not sit well with me was not included, no matter how popular or well-loved it may be to others.

I started with the name of saints, but picking those from the medieval ages, up to anything pre-modern. I looked up the stranger cousins of traditional Christianity, and then ventured into older and even obscure religions. Then mythologies. Then I mined my favourite books, picking the more creative, exotic, or old-sounding names and dropping the too-common, too-modern ones. I also chose the older versions of more modern names, if they sounded right. Names that would elicit too much association in one direction were left out (e.g. Katniss -- too young adult, mass-popular) unless I don't mind the association of the associations (e.g. Amidala -- Star Wars is old-school, much bigger and complex world), but a few popular names were included if there are enough interpretations spread out to keep the interpretation of my own artwork open (e.g. Jane -- plain, Austen, Goodall...).

I stayed away from names of actual people I know unless the painting was for them. But I have plans of using the names of my grandparents, great-grandparents, and their older kin (as they have all moved on to better places, and they have really nice names).

Each name on my list carries its own personality and I match them with the painting as much as I can. It does not have to be a literal match. Quite a few matches will possibly puzzle. I use my artist's eye to see the connection, and my artist's inner ear to hear the click.

The names I picked actually reflects and reveals a lot about me. If I become impossibly famous, biographers and academics will have a heyday deciphering my choice of names and probably come up with a humongous map of my alternate lives.

So here's the current partial list (A - L). Feel free to suggest and I will consider them!